The Letter

I recently received a letter in the mail from a fourteen year old boy, which was very surprising; because I didn’t think anyone his age used regular mail anymore. The letter was addressed to Dennis McDonald, Author in blatant letters that caught me off guard. I don’t often think of myself as an author. That title seemed reserved for those great souls who have spent years in the business, hundreds or rejection notices, and have a long list of published works in their portfolios. They have names like King, Koontz, Patterson, Grisham, etc. and toiled long and hard to be where they are at today. But there was the title by my name. Author. From a fourteen-year-old boy who I’d never met and lived out of town. The letter basically asked the question: What made me a writer? I thought long and hard about the answer. First of all, I think of myself as a writer first, an author second. My love for writing began way back when I was the same age as the boy who wrote the letter. I remember carrying a binder through school crammed full of notebook pages covered with unfinished stories. In those days I emulated the authors I read. I was a voracious reader who devoured books by Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, etc. I also read a lot of action books including Doc Savage, Conan, Lord of the Rings, etc. I even read westerns and Nancy Drew mysteries. I was a big James Bond fan and many of my stories were spy thrillers of Chuck Carter, agent for D.R.O.N.E (Defense Reserves of National Enforcement) or Jason Young, agent for ATLAS , a futuristic James Bond in the year 2321 who had a talking chimp as his side-kick (no kidding). I probably suffered at that time what no one knew existed: ADD (attention deficit disorder). I never finished any of my great tales. Oh, I would get a few chapters done, but then I would go on to write on something else that caught my ravenous imagination. Writing back then was a pain in the ass. No internet. No computers or word processors. Either you did it with a pencil on notebook paper and got writer’s cramp or lumbered away pecking at a typewriter and corrected your mistakes with white-out. Flash forward forty years. I had worked and raised my family and most of my life was behind me. The dream of being a writer was still there. It had never left and laid dormant inside waiting to be reborn. But this time there were tools that made it much easier to do. A computer now unlocked my imagination to flow through my fingers onto the keyboard. Internet gave me instant feedback on my writing and kept me in touch with readers. Thus, the author was born. Why am I a writer? I have no idea. Either you’re born with the hunger inside, or you’re not. Why I’m an author is because of long hours sitting in front of the computer, honing my writing skills, and constantly thinking of characters, plotlines, dialogue, story structure etc. and putting them into some cohesive form for others to read. That’s what it takes. BIC (butt in chair) is what I call it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a written letter to post for the first time in years to a teenage boy I never met.